By Brian Darr
Sam Now is filled with the unexpected twists and turns of a family undergoing great upheaval, filmed over the course of a quarter-century by one of its members. Inspired by National Film Board of Canada filmmakers like Norman McLaren, Reed Harkness began filming short movies featuring his younger half-brother Sam playing a superhero called the “Blue Panther,” as kids in Seattle, but when Sam’s mother Jois disappears from the family home without a word or a forwarding address, the focus of these small-gauge experiments shifts. Harkness proposes a new film, “The Blue Panther Finds His Mom,” leading to a road trip with hope of reconnection at the end. The emotional earthquake confronted on this trip is still creating aftershocks decades later.
Lucky for us, Harkness was on hand with a camera to capture how each reverberation affected Sam and his family. Like Michael Apted’s epic Up series but condensed into an hour-and-a-half, Sam Now gives us a rare chance to see a child grow to a teen, then to a young man, as a hugely compelling, long-term story unfolds.
I watched Sam Now knowing very little about it beforehand, and found its surprises extraordinarily profound. So when I had the opportunity to sit down with Harkness and his childhood friend and the documentary’s editor and producer Jason Reid, I steered the conversation to discussions of the fascinating aspects of the filmmaking that don’t take away any of the emotional impact of Sam Now’s revelations.
Brian Darr: I see Sam Now as two extraordinary, interconnected stories: a story of a family separation and attempted reunification; and the story of how you, Reed, came to document it. Both are particularly inseparable for a viewer—neither would have happened without the other.
Reed Harkness: They’re very intertwined. This is a story where the director’s notes and sketchbooks, and all these snippets of film over the years, are happening in time. I’m not really aware of what’s happening in the family until I am. When I am, it’s like I’m addressing my family and I’m figuring it out in the moment.
Is all the footage in the film shot by you, Reed, other than that pivotal moment when you hand Sam the camera?
Reed Harkness: Yeah, probably 98 percent me, and then there’s the Blue Panther sequences. I stepped back and had a friend be cinematographer on those, so that I could direct and help with stunts and costume designing.
Jason Reid: There’s also an archive of VHS family films from earlier on, some of which other family members shot. Sam, Jared, and Reed, and the cousins, were all kind of shooting these at different times.
You also mix a lot of film and video formats in Sam Now. I’m interested in the extended film techniques you use in the film, the hand processing, solarization, scratching on film, shooting in odd frame rates, and how you were inspired to bring those. Was that the Norman McLaren influence, or were you reading books about these techniques—or just experimenting?
Reed Harkness: This gets really complicated. The simplest way I could say it is, I grew up between Seattle and Palo Alto. My mom lived in Palo Alto, California. My dad lived in Seattle. My mom is an artist. She works in clay. She was a huge influence. I would go to a video store in Palo Alto and watch every single independent film they had there, to the point of the video store clerk saying, “Remember me. Please remember me when you get to this point of releasing your movie.”
Any chance it was Videoscope?
Reed Harkness: Yes! That’s it!
We had Scarecrow Video in Seattle, but to find that stuff still, you would have to be like, “Hey, who can tell me about this?” I had this instinct that I wanted to try to make films. Dead Man and Gummo came out, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, I think I could do something like this.” I felt a drive to do it. I found a Super 8 camera around my dad’s garage. I found a Morse G3 processing tank [to develop film], and converted it.
Because I didn’t think I could afford film school, I started calling experimental filmmakers in Seattle, asking if I could just come and hang out with them and help them in some way. There was one guy, Bruce Bickford (Baby Snakes), a claymation animator. I was really into animation. I asked, “How can I help you?” and he’s sitting on his living room floor cross-legged, making a 1,000-drawing tornado, and he’s like, “I don’t think you can help me.” Next door to him was a machinist who built camera parts for filmmakers and animators. He took me in. I started making armature parts on a mill and lathe.
He was a time-lapse photographer, and he would send me out with a 35mm time-lapse camera, stationed [at the] 4th Avenue viaduct in Seattle overnight to just watch trains go by. [In Seattle] these different film people were in all these strange little pockets. You’d have to go and find them. They would know each other through the need for equipment or titling or whatnot, and I would go work with them and gather information, but when it came to actually making [Sam Now], I was putting together all of these things I thought I could do but wasn’t sure.
The very first film I made of Sam was hand processed in the [Morse] tank. I accidentally exposed it to light. It became solarized. I thought the film was ruined. I took it—wet—to this little theater on Capitol Hill in Seattle. The Northwest Film Forum, just before they were beginning, was then called WigglyWorld, and had a Super 8 club. I’d seen a flyer and decided, “I’m gonna do this.” I came with this film, all wound on this little reel, and looked distressed and destroyed. I was like, “I made this film. I think I destroyed it and I don’t want to show it.”
Jamie Hook [who started the Northwest Film Forum] said, “Let’s just put it on the projector,” in front of all these adults drinking wine. I was really nervous and couldn’t look at the screen. Then I look to my right and I can see this light flashing on the person next to me as their eyes are just in awe of what’s happening. I turn and look at the screen and there’s this almost psychedelic effect on young Sam’s slow-motion face looking into this window, and I realize the power of what leaning into mistakes can do.
That solarized effect is so uncanny and amazing. I also love a scene where the color palette goes blue. I’m assuming that’s either a tinting or a strange film stock or something. It’s just so melancholy for the moment.
Jason Reid: That was just on the film.
Reed Harkness: There’s so much of that. From this period of ’97 through 2005, I had a Super 8 camera in my backpack all the time, and I was just shooting and shooting and shooting. I would make these little, edited-on-Super-8 films of my brother, and I really leaned into that. The feeling I got from making that first film with Sam: the experimentation, the process of making it, this sort of liberation. At the time, I was working as an animator, [which was] very tedious. This was a freeing experience for me.
It grew to be this whole bonding thing with my brother where we’d go on adventures. I had those two aspects going for me: adventure with brother and liberation, and experimenting with film. Two levels of play, two levels of being able to do something with the energies I felt psychically, and those two things met up really well to create this space where we could go on an adventure, we could do art, and we could face trauma.
Check out the Sam Now soundtrack playlist for the film on Spotify:
I’ve done a little Googling and see Sam has become quite an activist. I saw his articles about class and gender privilege in Ultimate Frisbee. His recent career path is shown in the documentary as well. Your quote in the film, “When I feel uncomfortable about something, I like to do something about it,” seems to encapsulate Sam as well.
Reed Harkness: Sam [has grown] to be a social worker. He helps youth who have similar stories in that they’ve got a deep trauma. They might feel some level of abandonment or fracture from their families, and he has a great devotion and fire to work with people like that, which I think is really powerful.
He’s also an activist, and he did a lot of work doing outreach with street youth. Most recently, he’s been helping domestic violence survivors. One thing he says in the movie, “Sometimes I do a lot of work focusing on other people’s shit, but that’s just a way for me to avoid my own things”—and I think there’s a lot of people like that in the world.
It’s easier to focus on somebody else’s problems than your own, but then here’s Sam in real time, making these recognitions. We could talk about what represents healing. The truth is we all have scars and those things might not ever be truly healed, but in this movie, what we can see is a lot of real-time growth.
Jason Reid: I got involved in 2015, now a long time ago. We had the archive of all the VHS stuff, all the Super 8 film and 16mm film, and all the mini DV stuff that covered the road trip to find Jois, but Reed, from 2008 on, didn’t do a lot of shooting until 2015. That’s when I started going through the footage and Reed picked up the camera and started shooting again, and enough had happened where [we realized] Sam’s really gone through some changes and it makes sense to start shooting again. From that point forward, the shooting informed the edit and the edit informed the shooting as we went on.
In 2019, we got the funding from ITVS, which enabled us to dive in full bore to finish the movie, both on post-production and shooting. Those next three years, from 2019 to 2022, Reed kept shooting and kept talking with Sam, and with other family members. We were trying to build the story as we went.
Act three was a work-in-progress. The last scene of the movie, not to be a big spoiler, but the final Super 8 film was shot just a few months before we finished the movie.
There was even stuff shot in the weeks leading up to locking the cut. A lot of times you have everything shot, “Okay, that movie’s over; we can’t go back and redo things.” But we had the luxury of Reed being a family member and having access to everybody and having the story still be ongoing.
The difficult part becomes how do you choose to end a story that is still ongoing?
At some point in late 2021, we realized, “Hey, I think we have enough now.” Of course, we still shot more after that, but I think we had the core of what we thought we needed to complete the story.
Reed Harkness: Yes and no. In the ’90s, it was a fun project. I was doing a series of short films of Sam. They were experimental, liberating. In 2002, it becomes about this relationship mostly between Sam and his mom, my stepmom, and our family, and stuff that’s rocking our family. At that point, it becomes this backpack you have to carry around with you for the rest of your life until it’s done.
Decades pass, as I am moving houses with this whole archive of film and video and hard drives and notebooks, and still thinking about it, still outlining it, still processing it.
As a filmmaker, this was the one story I really wanted to do. Other ideas would come up and I would shoot them down because this was more important. I wouldn’t let anything else come before this. I would do short projects. I became a cinematographer in that time, and I’ve done a lot of things, but as far as a feature, this was so important to me I wasn’t going to let anything else come before it.
I carried it for a very long time, and not just carrying this material, these ideas, this creative process, but I’m carrying all the stories of my family members with me that haven’t been shared with the other family members. It’s just gone to me, so when I finally show it to all of them in 2022, in Seattle at the Egyptian Theater, that’s an amazing catharsis for me.
Jason Reid: In the edit process, we went through so many iterations. We worked on act one so much. If you go back to the first edits, it changed hundreds or thousands of times, but landed in the right place. The first half of the story is much more linear. The second half of the movie, we get into more psychological and emotional reflection time.
It’s a lot more amorphous, as opposed to the road trip to go find mom, but that’s what we love about the movie: the first half is one thing and the second half, enters a new realm, a more adult realm.
You’ve taken the film to documentary film festivals, indie festivals, Asian American-themed festivals, and more generalist festivals. Are there different things that different audiences get out of the film?
Reed Harkness: It feels like every time we do a screening, the Q&A is different, and I’m learning new things from the audience and the way that they’re asking questions. I talk to a lot of filmmakers who get really tired of Q&As because they just get the same questions over and over again. We get some questions repeated, but really different questions come out. It’s a story of family, and there’s so many relatable characters. At the end of the movie, people are left with a feeling that connects them to something.
Jason Reid: People reflect the movie back upon themselves. Sometimes, especially with smaller audiences, it’ll be immediate outpourings of, “Oh my God, I had this thing that happened. I have a strange relationship with my mom or dad or other family members. We have skeletons in the closet.” Like Reed said, it spans a wide spectrum.
Sometimes the questions are about filmmaking because there are so many different formats and elements, and they want to know about that. Sometimes they want answers to specific questions about the characters. How is the family responding? How is Sam responding to this? How has this movie impacted their lives?
Sometimes it goes into thematic topics, like intergenerational trauma, men and masculinity, and sharing your emotions. Screening in different countries, we realized that the themes of family, and of dealing with difficult things that happen in our youth that we have to process later in life, are universal.
That’s a tremendous positive of the movie. There’s not a clean resolution. It leaves the audience with a lot of questions, both internally within themselves as they relate it back to their own stories that they don’t have answers for, but also just questions about the movie and the Harkness family and about Reed, what he went through making this.
We can’t wait to have it out more widely than just film festival audiences. I think [being] on Independent Lens and available on PBS, will open up a whole new realm of interest and conversation.
Brian Darr works in libraries and dreams in cinemas. He writes about film for publications like Senses of Cinema, Eat Drink Films, and SFGate. His blog Hell on Frisco Bay covered San Francisco Bay Area film festivals and indie film for over a decade; now he posts at Letterboxd at @HellOnFriscoBay.